The theatre, which has a capacity of a dozen West End theatres put together or five Metropolitan Opera houses and is out in the middle of nowhere, was filled to overflowing. Toute Athenes was present and the Peloponnesians were out in strength. Though Callas may have drawn local shepherds down from the hillside as well, that was a long time ago. Now, shepherds and shepherdesses, arriving in Hondas, think nothing of shelling out 2500 drachmas a ticket and mingling in the lower tiers with PASOK ministers who have done so much to rejuvenate the countryside with EEC money.
Yet for two previous weekends, plays had been performed to such an avalanche of empty limestone seats that there were rumors EOT might have to abandon the Epidaurus Festival altogether and turn it into a bauxite quarry. One of the reasons for this audience stay-away was the Mondiale on TV, and this may explain the stampede to Epidaurus afterwards. We live in a world devoted to super-luminaries, and international star Diego Armando Maradona was now replaced by national star Aliki Vouyouklaki.
Aliki isn’t so much a performer as a cultural object of the screen and stage which, breaking into the most hallowed hall of ancient drama for the first time, turned herself into an ethnic event. Politicians, leaders of arts and literature, socialist plutocrats, jet-setters and, above all, “the people” were massed together in one mighty body social. It’s on such an occasion that one is swept back into antiquity and feels the full brunt of what it was like to live in an ancient polis at the time of some great festival.
The only thing that seemed lacking was any sense of religious cult, though Aliki is about as close as Greece can get nowadays to producing a goddess. In this age of scepticism, Aliki is a reassuringly living, throbbing thing. As close to immortal youth as one’s ever likely to be, she is nowhere more properly worshipped than here at the sanctuary of Asklepios, god of homeopathy and slimnastics, for at 50-whatever, she still has the blush of youth, the figure of goddess-as-nymph, and a face as smooth as the Aegean during halcyon days.
Who is this creature and what are her attributes? She is a local deity whose sacred precincts are roughly defined by the borders of modern Greece and the transmission radius or ERT 1 and 2. Her worshippers number about 10 million and the only ritual she demands is applause. If only one among the 15,000 spectators the other night did not applaud, she would have noticed him, and already his fate will have been swift and terrible.
Within these precincts, she is as familiar, and therefore as difficult to describe vividly, as the Parthenon, which can be considered her only serious rival, though unlike the latter she is in no need of a crane to keep her joints together. To those who lie outside her cult-area – among the uninitiated, the agnostics, the barbarians – she is equally elusive and best described as a phenomenon caused by local atmospheric conditions. Comparisons are particularly clumsy when it comes to Aliki. Brigitte Bardot, Doris Day, Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, like Aliki, may have achieved fame without learning how to act – may have achieved it because they didn’t act -but otherwise there is little similarity. They aren’t even Greek…
Aliki swept into the orchestra of Epidaurus in the guise of Lysistrata, the Aristophanic heroine of international peace and the women’s movement, issues prominent in Greece’s domestic and global affairs during these great green days. And she came on not like a mere queen, but like a queen and her steed, for there was a prance in her step which spelled triumph. She fairly snorted brimstone at the smell of victory.
Now, in this far from perfect world, it must be said there was a small number of embittered, twisted intellectuals in the audience who had come to see Aliki fail, who spread evil rumors that the holy stones of Epidaurus would go up in smoke; critics of unreadable journals sharpening their quills to dip into venom and expose the goddess in the nakedness of her acting skills. Then, like the legions of darkness, they were put to flight at the sound of Aliki’s first cockcrow and the stones themselves (some say) were heard clapping their hands together. Poor fools! Of course, Aliki wasn’t Lysistrata, any more than she was ever Queen Amalia or Mando Mavroyenous, among those strings of Greek heroines she’s impersonated. She was simply Aliki herself playing at Lysistrata – Aliki the immortal -whom millions of Greek women would like to be and what millions of Greek men want their women to be like. Seriously? Well, maybe not exactly seriously, but not entirely unseriously, either.
Much of theatre is make-believe, and there’s a metaphysical joke here (occasionally revealed by a wink) shared between Aliki and her millions of admirers. But remember, to your peril, that Aliki invented it and is sole owner of the patent. Great goddess, may you be next minister of culture!
